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$250K gift will digitize Trumbull property records
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Trumbull County commissioners are expected today to approve an agreement that will allow most of the records in the Trumbull County Recorder’s Office to be scanned and digitized to speed up the work needed to allow gas and oil drilling to take place.
The agreement calls for The Associated Landowners of the Ohio Valley to pay $253,877 to allow Document Technology Systems to scan and digitize the records and make them available to the recorder’s office. There will be no cost to the county.
ALOV hopes that putting the records into digital form will make title searches on Trumbull County land more efficient and quicker for the drilling companies, Bill Danzo, an assistant Trumbull County prosecutor, told commissioners Wednesday.
Before gas companies drill, title searchers have to check affected properties as far back as possible to determine whether there are previous leases or restrictions on the property.
ALOV, a nonprofit organization that represents property owners in Trumbull County who control 80,000 acres of land, also will provide up to $19,000 to pay for guards to provide security at the recorder’s office, Recorder Diana Marchese said.
Once the agreement is in place, the scanning and digitizing will begin right away and will be complete by June 15, Marchese said.
Document Technology Systems will do the scanning from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., possibly seven days a week, Marchese said. Normal office hours will be maintained, and normal recorder’s office business should not be interrupted, Marchese said. The security guards are needed for the nonoffice hours when the scanning is being done, Marchese said.
The recorder’s office already has records scanned, digitized and available online from 1980 to the present. Document Techology Systems will scan and digitize documents from 1795 to 1980.
Once the digitization is complete — including deeds, leases and mortgages — they also will be available on the recorder’s website, Marchese said.
“It will have a great benefit to the county — all the [records] will be digitized, and they can search the records from anywhere,” Marchese said.
Another benefit is that title searchers and ordinary citizens will no longer need to check paper records, which will result in less wear and tear on the paper records, she said.
Marchese said it appears that ALOV is still negotiating with a gas company to lease the land held by the ALOV members. She believes the digitizing step is another indication that ALOV is close to an agreement and that drilling will follow.
“It’s wonderful for our office,” Marchese said of getting the records digitized at no cost. “It’ll be helpful to our office, the local searchers and the companies in the gas and oil business.”
Some gas and oil search work has been done already at her office, Marchese said, but she suspects the bulk of the work will occur after a gas company comes to an agreement with ALOV.
Mahoning County Recorder Noralynn Palermo said Oklahoma-City based Chesapeake Energy Corp. made an offer to her office at the end of last year to pay $200,000 to $300,000 to have ACS Land Records scan and digitize Mahoning County’s records.
She turned over the information to the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office, but she has not heard back yet on the proposal.
Records maintained by the Mahoning County Recorder’s Office are digitized from 1985 to the present, but because Ohio law requires Social Security numbers to be redacted from any records available online, those records are not provided on the Mahoning County recorder’s website, Palermo said.
In Columbiana County, Chesapeake Energy Corp. completed the scanning of all the recorder’s office records a week ago during a six-week process that cost the company about $250,000.
The recorder’s office expects to receive its copy of the records from Chesapeake soon, and thereafter the digitized records will be available to the public at the recorder’s office, said Recorder Craig Brown.
Eventually the records will be available on the recorder’s office website, but not right away, Brown said, because there will be expense and work involved in redacting Social Security numbers.
The recorder’s offices in Columbiana and Mahoning counties both are reporting a high volume of title searches being done as a result of gas and oil drilling.